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The Disturbed Person
Happy Birthday, David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace was an America author of novels, short stories, and essays and a university professor of creative writing. His writing identified and magnified the anxieties and perspectives of his generation as he explored the absurd and melancholic parts of the human soul.
Today, February 21st, David Foster Wallace would have been 59 years old. In honor of one of my favorite short story writers, I’ve written my own version of his short story, The Depressed Person, which appeared in Harper Magazine in January 1998.
The Disturbed Person
The disturbed person was in a ridiculously rigid amount of emotional turmoil. The pain was so paramount within her it was unexplainable and the impossibility of sharing the depth of it contributed exponentially to the horror of experiencing it.
Although those around her disagreed, withdrawing was her only hope of sanity. Because it was within where she discovered that being able to express even a tiny portion of this pain — the stench of it, the rattling and the filth, its deformed posture — could perhaps lessen the distressing pressure of it upon her soul. Thus, the disturbed person opted to record the pain, locking the feelings as best she could onto the page with words.
